This. Attrition often doesn't appear until the next vesting cliff / bonus. If leadership is not careful, they could lose a lot of key people all at once. For a

This. Attrition often doesn't appear until the next vesting cliff / bonus. If leadership is not careful, they could lose a lot of key people all at once. For a big company like Google this is easy to stomach (they still pay well enough that _someone_ can be made to do the work eventually) but this could well be death to a startup. Even an understaffed team can crawl along with a skeleton crew for a while, but you will burn people out. A burned out team ceases to make forward progress and is going to act like things are in maintenance mode. You're liable to spend more money and SWE-hours looking for backfills vs if you'd just kept your team intact.